Reading Hamlet

Utterly empty, utterly a source…— Seamus Heaney

When the others were asleep she sometimes
in the silence took Hamlet from the shelf
and read aloud the scenes where he
renounced poor staggering Ophelia
or stalked the predawn hours, consumed,
wild to know who spilt his father’s blood,
and I would yawn and drift and nod
until she sent me off to bed. “One kiss,”
she’d say and I’d begrudge her, who’d shown
my father out the door, the dark play of
that between us. In the moon-mown hours
of her dying, only the poems she’d given me,
the boundless anguish of a prince. Never
nearer, those far-off castled nights.